"Grumps" wrote in message
...

I just did a simple test using my CD player as a signal source (pure
single tone test disk), and ran SpectraPLUS on the captured wav file to
see the spectrum and SNR.
The camcorder manages a mere 53dB, but the line-in (on-board PC sound)
gets to 71dB.

Good show!

A lot of this (noise; am I wrong to want to get nearer to 90+dB?) is
probably in the CD player (portable),

Try a different CD player, maybe a regular table model.

Portables can be a tad noisy. Even low cost table models can do over 90 dB.

I wouldn't expect much more than 80 dB from an on-board PC sound card.

You can run some of these tests quite nicely with this freewa

http://audio.rightmark.org/download.shtml

RMA 5.5

so I'll grab my audio tone generator from work tomorrow.

You'll be hard put to find a bench audio tone generator that can beat a $40
DVD player.